MELO NOT TALKING ABOUT BENCH ROLE

LA.» Through the first LAKE CHARLES, week of camp with the Houston Rockets, all indications are that Carmelo Anthony will be OK coming off the bench if that’s the role coach Mike D’antoni gives him.

That doesn’t mean the 10time allstar, most of those honors with the Nuggets, wants to discuss it.

“I don’t like talking about it,” Anthony said Saturday before the team’s last practice at Mcneese State before returning to Houston. “People always been speculating. They always speculate so I will continue not to talk about it.”

While Anthony, who is in his first year with the Rockets after one tumultuous season in Oklahoma City, refused to discuss whether he’ll start or be a reserve, he had plenty to say about a variety of other subjects, candidly answering every other question thrown his way. He reflected on his year with the Thunder, a place where he never seemed to fit in and averaged a careerlow 16.2 points in 78 starts.

He said he got “caught up” in outside opinions of what people believed he should do and recounted all the thoughts that were swimming through his head last season.

“(People saying), ‘Oh, he’s a stretch 4,’ ” Anthony said. “‘Oh, he should come off the bench. Oh, he should not shoot this many times. Oh, he should just let Russ (Westbrook) do this.’ So, it was just so much of that that was ... going around that I had to block it out and get away from it and not even think about it.”

But even after he figured out how to do that, he still had to handle all of those who professed to know things about him when they had no clue what was really happening.

“I don’t really care about somebody telling me how I think,” he said. “A lot of people that’s talking about me or has an opinion don’t really know who I am. Never talked to me before. Don’t know how I think. So, it’s funny to me to just hear a quote from somebody else saying: ‘He feels like this or he feels like that. And he should do this, or he should do that. Or he even said this or said that.’ ”